Navigation for Phoenix Thoughts: My Top 5 Features for the Next Version of RSS Bandit - Dare Obasanjo's weblog

I’ve started thinking about the next release of RSS Bandit and I thought it would be a good time to share some of my thoughts with our users and see what people would like us to add, fix or otherwise improve the application. It’s hard to believe that I started working on RSS Bandit almost five years ago. In that time, we’ve had the application downloaded over a million times and at the height of it’s popularity we were seeing up to a 100,000 downloads a month when we shipped a new release. Since then the popularity of the application has waned a little with the advent of Web-based feed readers like Bloglines and Google Reader as well as the fact that the amount of work Torsten and I can get done in our spare time pales in comparison to what folks who do this for a living like Nick Bradbury can get done.

That said, there are features I want from a feed reader that I don’t get from FeedDemon or Google Reader which is why I still work on RSS Bandit and why I started this blog entry. Below are the list of features I want us to do in the Phoenix release in order of which ones are most likely to be in the final version. Let me know what you think of them.

Meme Tracking: I’m now officially at the point where I don’t have enough time to read all the feeds I have in my subscription list anymore. For the most part, I’ve gotten around this by browsing programming.reddit, Techmeme and Sam Ruby’s MeMeme about once or twice a day. Although they are all great, the problem I have is that there are parts of the blogosphere that none of these sites is good at tracking. For example, none of these sites is really on top of the Microsoft employee blogosphere which I’m interested in for obvious reasons.

I've been talking about building a feature similar to FeedDemon's popular topics for a long time but I've now gotten to the point where I don't think I can get a lot of value out of my blog subscriptions without having this feature.

Podcast Management User Interface: We kind of ran out of time with the last release and shipped a podcast downloading feature without an actual user interface for managing your podcasts (i.e. seeing pending downloads, percent complete, etc) which is really lame. Since I don’t subscribe to a lot of podcasts, this hasn’t been an issue. However I suspect that the reason I don’t is exactly because we didn’t complete implementation of this feature.

Plugin Model: One of the things I haven’t liked is that sometimes I want to add a single feature but once I check it in, I still need to wait for all the features slated for that release before we can get it out to users. We could move to having more frequent releases but I’m not sure people want to deal with reinstalling the application every two months because I added a single feature. What I’d like us to build a plugin model where we can ship meaningful extensions to the core application without having it tied to a release.

I like the multi-pronged approach taken by Windows Live Writer where there are multiple APIs provided depending on the depth of integration and complexity of the functionality you’d like to add to the application. Torsten started on this a while ago but we never got around to refactoring the proposed extensibility APIs in a way that satisfied us.

Feeds Grouped by Sources: Right now, I’m not really happy with the way our integration with NewsGator Online works. There’s an issue with the fact that NewsGator doesn’t know what to do with intranet feeds or feeds that are actually on your local machine (for the wacky folks that subscribe to their system event logs). In addition, folks have asked if we'll ever integrate with the Windows RSS platform and I've had concerns about that since there are features we need that it doesn't provide.

I’ve considered that the solution to both problems is to break out the My Feeds node into three sub-nodes; RSS Bandit feeds, Windows RSS platform feeds (shared with IE, Outlook and Windows Live Mail) and NewsGator feeds. This would require some radical re-engineering since it now assumes we’ll be using three different stacks to poll for feed updates but in the long run I think this is the right approach. This is probably the most complicated and controversial feature we’ll have in the release.

A Single Node Mapping to Multiple Feeds: I was recently looking at my FriendFeed page and it brought home to me that many geeks have multiple feeds that represent the content they are placing on the Web. For example, my friend Joshua Allen has a personal weblog as well as a work-related weblog. It’s really lame to have two entries for him in RSS Bandit when it’s all the same person.

The main problems with a feature like this aren't around the complexity of the information but more around how to represent this to users in the application in a way that is understandable and easy to manage.

If you are an RSS Bandit user I’d love to hear what you think of this list. Does this list sound relevant to you or are there more pressing features you’d like to see addressed first? Also what are your pet peeves?

PS: Someone recently asked me if there are any corporate RSS Bandit users. I know a bunch of folks use it at work and that some places actually have it as part of the default install on their work PCs but don’t have any details handy. If you have any anecdotes to share, I’d appreciate it.